AUSTIN — In his latest defiant pushback against Washington mandates, Gov. Rick Perry is warning federal officials that Texas will not comply with a law designed to curb prison rapes — a statute signed into law by President Barack Obama's predecessor, Republican George W. Bush.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Perry accused the Obama administration of enacting rules for the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003 that Texas cannot afford to implement.

While failure to comply with the federal law carries possible penalties, including loss of some federal grant funding for justice programs and potential litigation, state and federal officials said Monday they did not expect Perry's refusal to trigger action against Texas anytime soon — especially since other states have also expressed heartburn with the new rules.

The rules have been in development for several years.

“Washington has taken an opportunity to help address a problem in our prisons and jails, but instead created a counterproductive and unnecessarily cumbersome regulatory mess for the states,” Perry stated in the three-page letter dated Friday. “Absent standards that acknowledge the operational realities of our prisons and jails, I will not sign your form (certifying compliance with the act) and I will encourage my fellow governors to follow suit.”

Perry cited three problems with the new rules.

They prohibit most cross-gender viewing, in which female guards, for example, supervise male showers. Because roughly 40 percent of Texas prison guards are women, it would be impossible to properly staff the state's 109 state prisons. A proposal by federal consultants to remove some security cameras and obstructing lines of sight “is ridiculous” and would be unsafe, Perry said. Even so, other states have complied with the new law by constructing half screens in shower areas and staffing strip-search sites for male convicts with male guards. Women convicts are generally supervised by women in Texas.

The new rules prohibit housing 17-year-olds, the age of being an adult Texas in terms of criminal responsibility, with 18-year-olds, the age of majority in most states. “PREA sight and sound separation standards would require Texas to separate 17-year-old adult inmates from 18-year-old adult inmates at substantial cost with no discernible benefit to the state or its inmates,” Perry said.

The new rules also increase staffing requirements in some lockups. Separating prisoners would require additional lockups and staffing — as many as 30 additional officers at one county jail, Perry said. .

Prison officials said Monday that reported sexual assaults have declined by about 10 percent in the past two years, after a Safe Prisons program implemented in 2001 forced operational changes that have reduced attacks even further.

Scott Medlock, an Austin attorney who has litigated several sexual-assault cases in adult and youth lockups, said Perry's assertion that the rules “were created in a vacuum with little regard from input” from corrections officials is curious since the rules have been developed over the past decade — through Republican and Democratic administrations — with input from state and prison officials, advocates and criminal-justice experts.

“It is still a problem,” he said. “Not enough has been done to address it.”